


Lessons

by wastrelwoods



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Cooking, Exploring the Taako backstory, Gen, Pre-Canon, Some rough stuff happens and there's lots o' death, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Character, anyway i like her better than all this nonsense but it was a good effort, miles away from canon because you know who i really didnt see coming....lup....of COURSE, nothing bad happens bc he is trans it's just a background fact, some stuff that probably verges on child abuse be aware
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 01:55:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9101167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/wastrelwoods
Summary: Taako lives, and Taako learns.





	

**Author's Note:**

> didn't know how badly i wanted to write this until i wrote it so wow

people go  
but how  
they left  
always stays 

rupi kaur, _milk and honey_

 

*

Taako’s twelve the first time he finds himself totally alone in the world. Young for any creature, and especially for an elf, but then who said life gives a single flying fuck how old you are, whether or not you’re ready for the shit it’s gonna hand out to you. Get in the car or get run over, right?

The woman he lives with might be his mother, or not, but she’s never made any real kind of parental claim over Taako. He doesn’t mind. During the day he runs through the streets of New Elfington, goes where he wants and does what he wants, stares hungrily at the rich, well-dressed, haughty upper-class citizens parading themselves on the other side of the street, doesn’t speak a word to anyone. When it gets dark he makes his way briskly back to the little shanty with the short candle burning in the window, greets the high elf woman waiting there, and settles in to practice his meditation in safety. 

She has a broad band of freckles across her thin brown face, a close-cropped swath of dark hair, two bright amber eyes, just like Taako. She’s a magician, he thinks, or a soothsayer, who reads the palms of passers-by and gives them the fortunes they want to hear. Taako never asks her to teach him, and so he never learns whether or not the woman truly possessed a single drop of magic. When he thinks back on this time in later years, he’s glad for the ability to suspend his disbelief. 

As distant as the high elf woman is, she is kind. She buys bread with the money the visitors give her for their fortunes, and always saves a share for him. When Taako let slip that he wasn't actually a girl, if it was all the same to her, she nodded and told him it was up to Taako, and never raised the issue again. He can’t remember if he loved her, but he does remember that he cried on the day he returned to find her slumped over her card-reading table, killed by a customer who didn’t care for the fortune they’d heard her tell. 

He’s twelve, and whoever the woman was to him, she’s gone for good. It’s the first time he realizes people can leave with so little warning. 

It’s a strange but gradual realization that Taako can’t stay where he is, lurking in a house that doesn’t belong to him anymore. He doesn’t quite know how to make money, can’t tell fortunes or make magic or fight worth a damn, but he gives it his best shot, and lasts fully a week in the wide world before he’s caught with his hand in some lords or ladies’ back pocket, trying to nick their purse. 

The New Elfington militia are relatively kind, all things considered, one or two tutting over him and saying things like ‘orphan’ and ‘poor little fellow’, neither of which mean much to Taako. His stomach churns at the thought of starving at the back of a jail cell instead of out on the streets, and he wishes for the hundredth time in his life that he could do something, anything to get out of it, to survive. 

The door to his cell creaks open and an old gnome woman shuffles in, peering at Taako with unseeing eyes and informing him in no uncertain terms that he was to call her ‘Auntie’. Taako is a far cry from understanding what she wants, but if there’s one lesson he’s learned in his twelve short years, it’s not to push his luck. 

*

He stays with Auntie nearly three years, learning all the time. She’s nothing like his maybe-mother, constantly close and sometimes overbearing, ordering Taako around the house her every waking moment. Orphan, to her, means someone to keep house in her old age. And it is old age keeping her down, she insists to Taako, not her blindness. She managed perfectly damn well for seventy-odd years without her sight, but now her hip had gone and it was giving her no end of trouble. 

Taako thinks he might hate her, though of course he knows better than to say it. More specifically, he hates the grunt work, all the sweeping and dusting and scrubbing and organizing and gods forbid he smack into the china cabinet and send the sugar bowl crashing to the ground. He nursed a bruise on his elbow for a full week afterward, and Auntie’s cane left him a welt on the back of his legs, besides. 

When she’s teaching him how to cook dinner, though, she softens completely, to a strange kind of creature Taako has never encountered before, calling him ‘pet’ and asking him to ‘pass her the flour, there’s a dear’, humming a song to herself as she stirs a bechamel sauce. 

The cooking is….nice. Taako doesn’t know quite how to place the warm feeling in his bones when he stands over the hot stove, or digs his knuckles into the bread dough. He catches his mind drifting back to yesterday’s chicken roast as he meditates, the soothing motion of the knife in his hands as he dices garlic following him into his dreams. He catches himself humming along to a familiar tune one day, and bites down on his lip to stop himself, but Auntie only laughs and reaches over to rustle his hair with one gnarled hand. 

In time, it creeps very close to something he might call ‘good’, if pressed. Taako forgets how fond life is of turning the tables on him. 

*

The rangers aren’t exactly thrilled to take on a camp cook who looks like he’s barely out of childhood, but Taako can be persuasive when he needs to be, and they don’t ask the wrong questions of him. Bluff like you’ve got a killer charisma modifier, that’s Taako’s game, and with a bit of convincing he gets them to buy into the fiction that he’s just turned eighteen. There are no elves in the company to prove him wrong, just men and orcs and halflings and one goliath. 

Whatever doubts still linger in their minds, Taako’s learned well enough from Auntie that his cooking soothes them into grudging acceptance. “Not bad, kid,” they say, and one or two exclaim that his stew must be the best they’ve ever tasted. It’s a good feeling, realizing that he has a marketable skill after all, nearly enough to squelch the anxiety that still boils in his stomach during his first few months on the road. 

Every time he closes his eyes, he can hear the noise of Auntie’s head colliding with the floor, and he feels nauseous all over again. It was an accident, he knows, but no less his fault for that. Taako fucked up, and he knows it. He hadn’t meant to startle her, but the souffles had come out just right, finally, and he’d been so excited, and he’d never thought--

Well. Whatever. He’s learned his lesson. Innocent mistake or no, sometimes there are nasty consequences, and there’s nothing he can do to change the past. So Taako looks to the future. 

*

He’s in his first battle somewhere in the depths of the Felicity Wilds, when he’s still with the first company, and it goes much faster than he’d expected. There’s shouting, and screaming, and the clash of metal on metal and when he crawls out from underneath the cart, still trembling, there are half a dozen dead gerblins around the fire, and the goliath is bleeding out from an ugly, crooked gash in his belly. In the same moment he’s turning away to vomit at the sight, and gods, the smell, Taako swears to himself that he’s never going to be a fighter. 

Fighters, he learns very quickly, might get the glory, but they always die horrible deaths, sooner or later. 

* 

He goes from camp to camp, and eventually he stops keeping track of the names and the places. He thinks by now he’s a better cook now than Auntie ever was. His hair keeps growing out, so Taako keeps it braided back. He’s taller now, but less knobbly, and still thin though the weight in his body has started to redistribute without his realizing it, slowly but surely. The gap between his front teeth never closes, but one day Taako catches his reflection in the frying pan as he rinses it clean, realizes that while he wasn’t looking he must have grown older anyway.

Eighteen isn’t just a helpful lie to land him a place in the company anymore. These days, the handsome roguish adventurers accept the bread he brings them with eager hands, but their eyes follow Taako, hungry for something more.

Taako likes that.

* 

He spends nearly a year with a band who turn out to be bandits, and that’s the bloodiest of his life so far, but there’s a dark elf wizard in their company, and when it’s dark she sits beside the fire with Taako and meditates. It’s nice for once not to be the only person awake. 

She won’t teach Taako magic -- hers is mostly the fighting kind anyway, and Taako can do without learning a hundred different ways to set small fires or see in the dark, both of which he can manage on his own already -- but she shows him her book, the blank scroll of Oghma on the spine. Taako entertains the possibility, maybe for a rainy day, but for now it’s distant, too impractical, too expensive (the starting listing for wands is nearly double his monthly pay). When the w -- red ro visits hi fi time, he el Taako -- ing to be a really gr --- 

The job doesn’t pan out, in the end. Half the company goes on strike, which means they rise up and slit the other half’s throats in the dead of night. Taako runs, but he tucks away the dark elf’s book at the bottom of his own bag first. 

*

he wa goes on, and n there are two s --

 

\-- ies, then dies agai - 

seven of th --

can’t let --

 

*

There’s a place in Taako’s memory he can’t quite get back to, a couple of weeks after he leaves the bandits behind for good. Everything’s a bit fuzzy. If he thinks about it too hard his brain seems to just...short out, like a broken radio. Somehow, it doesn’t bother him too much. He uses the cash he stole from the bandit camp to buy himself a wagon, and settles in for something a little different. Taako front and center, finding his spotlight, baby. 

It’s hard to remember just where the idea springs from, but it’s the best one he’s ever had. Entertainment, that’s what it’s all about. His maybe-mother made a decent living for years giving people interesting, entertaining, happy fortunes, Taako knows firsthand how well people will pay for you to make them happy. He remembers how happy Auntie used to get when Taako followed a recipe exactly right, remembers how he learned to up his pay grade by slipping sweet smiles in during his interview, doing his hair up nice and neat. Entertainment pays well. 

Pretty pays well, too, but that’s not the only reason Taako starts lining his eyes with kohl and his shirts with lace. He’s for sure not trying to go back to-- to change his mind about being anything other than a boy, hell no. It’s more about looking like the people he’d always admired from afar, parading down the streets of New Elfington, the ones who wore their family fortunes on a gold chain around their throats. Pretty also keeps him in good standing with whatever handsome young men catch his eye. 

Entertainment starts to pay really well, after a slow start, once word of Taako and his wide smile and his nimble fingers and his pretty face begin to spread. “His cooking is just to die for,” people say, and soon enough the people start to turn out in droves. 

It’s the best time of his life, going town to town in style, lauded by strangers who don’t know a single goddamn thing about Taako but who love him anyway. He should have done this years ago, he thinks, should have realized that he would do his best work riding solo. 

*

The crowds are flagging, and months of leaving everyone he’s spoken to one-on-one before the sun rises starts to wear on him, and eventually that starts to show in front of the audiences, which he can’t have. The Sizzle It Up! persona was extremely well-crafted and took him almost a year to perfect, and Taako won’t let a pathetic little thing like loneliness tank his dream, so he finally caves and lets someone in on the show. He regrets it almost instantly. 

Sazed is wonderful. No problems there. He looks at Taako like every word that crosses his lips has been sent from the gods themselves, gets everything done so quickly and quietly that Taako forgets how much work gets put into this act of his in the first place, so grateful is he to finally stop doing the damn dishes after every show. He’s moved up in the world, and now he gets to act like it. He even gets fucking t-shirts printed. Taako could never have managed that little piece of work on his own.

But that’s just the thing. He looks at Sazed, and he can feel his grip on the reins slipping away from him with every second that he lets Sizzle It Up! become a two-man job. When other people get involved, Taako has learned, over many long, difficult years, things get fucked up, and fast. 

But months go by, and when Sazed shows no signs of having higher aspirations than to help Taako live his dream and meekly watch from behind the scenes, he lets his guard down. 

It’s going to be okay, he decides.

It’s the worst mistake of his life to date. 

*

Because it’s Sazed who suggests he try out the transmutation to spice up the act, when the audiences start to get smaller the second time. After all, affording a wand is no problem these days. Taako feels that familiar buzz of excitement under his skin he remembers from back in the bandit’s camp, and he agrees, too easily, thinking about all the entertainment value and not about the danger. 

He’s been too sheltered from danger since Sizzle It Up! began. It’s made him softer, stupider. It’s made him more trusting. 

And the magic is deceptively easy, with Oghma’s book there to guide him every step of the way. His list of marketable skills doubles almost overnight, and it’s a rush like nothing he’s ever known. The first time Taako turns salt to sugar onstage, the whole crowd titters and oohs like he’s just set off fireworks, and there’s no going back. 

* 

What he didn’t realize then, and doesn’t circle back to realizing for many years afterwards, was that he’d misplaced his trust. He’d thought for over half a decade that the problem was an overconfidence in himself, or just a gaping flaw in his design, or a bout of the worst luck in the world. He should have been watching Sazed. 

It was almost...poetic, in a sick way. He’d been complaining that he did all the dirty work, while Taako took the credit for his accomplishments. So he let Taako take the fall, too. 

* 

Forty people die in Glamor Springs, and as instinct kicks in and Taako bolts for his cart under cover of night he remembers that death isn’t just for battlefields or bandit-ravaged wastelands. Death is close behind his heels no matter where Taako goes, and oh, gods, what if he had tasted that chicken before he’d passed it out? 

He sits with his head in his hands while Sazed takes the reins, and wonders if that would have been better or worse than leaving half a town of innocent people choking on their own blood in his wake. 

Taako can’t even tell where he went wrong.

*

It’s not a surprise when Sazed leaves, but it still hurts. Taako is furious with himself, for not anticipating this somehow, for losing himself his only chance at a charmed life, for _murdering_ forty people with his own godsdamn _stupidity_ \--

For the first time since he was twelve, he settles down in one place, finds a nice dark corner of Neverwinter to crawl into until he’s found some way to deal with this, to move on with his life, as if he even deserves the chance. Do people move on after a mistake as colossally stupid as Glamor Springs? He doesn’t know. 

When his pockets empty out and the pangs of hunger finally motivate him to move, he tries to take a job bussing for some small tavern, and realizes that cooking is no longer a viable option, probably forever. He leaves the kitchen shaking and nauseous, wanders up and down the streets like he’s sleepwalking in the middle of the afternoon, contemplates giving up and walking off the side of one of Neverwinter’s many bustling buildings half a dozen times before he decides that he’s not going to waste twenty-odd years of sheer effort he’s put into saving his own ass now. Taako’s a survivor, baby. 

He doesn’t have cooking, and he doesn’t flatter himself that two or three weeks of living on the run followed by two or three more of lying on the floor of his hotel room without moving or speaking have left him much of his trademark good looks, so it looks like there’s only one real option open to him. It’s a relief to discover he can manage to transmute his hair to an unrecognizable platinum blond without poisoning a single person, though for credibility’s sake he has to trim the lace off most of his shirts. It’s terrible, but Taako’s mind is made up now, and he’s gonna do whatever it takes to survive. 

The rest is a familiar song and dance. But this time, when the company’s leader asks for his qualifications, he just says “Wizard.” 

*

Everybody leaves, eventually. So Taako spends the next few years getting real good at being the first one to go.

He never expected people like Merle and Magnus would be the type to stick around.

**Author's Note:**

> probably not as anti-sazed as a lot of people would like, huh? also taako's narrator decided it was none of my business who he was sleeping with so i honestly can't even tell u whether or not they were fucking here?? i mean, probably.
> 
> also i hope it was really clear that i was trying to replicate the static-ed out memories during those portions when the formatting got all fucky sorry if that was confusing to you


End file.
